If parents are hyper focused on Lexile, we have to recognize first that as educators a teacher made them that way. While the American Academy of Pediatricians has now finally made a formal statement about the importance of early childhood literacy, I don’t know a single obstetrician that hands a newborn baby to a parent and says, “His Lexile is zero. We would like to see that improve.” That happens when children start school. So, we have to recognize parents care about that because we have made them care.
The other piece that we need to be mindful of as educators is that Lexile is a framework that was originally designed to help librarians and teachers select collection materials and match kids with books. It was never meant to be a label for children to wear or a limit on their reading lives. There’s a place for leveling when we’re looking at emergent readers, guided reading, but for independent reading we need to understand that readers out in the world outside of school do not read at the optimum edge of their reading competence at all times.
The driver for independent reading out in the world – and I believe school is the real world too, but out in the world where they’re freed from school limitations on reading, we read based on interest, on need, on topic. If kids only know how to pick a book based on whether it has a blue dot on the spine, they are not becoming independent readers. They are crippled. Grandma’s bookshelf, the public library, the local book store, not leveled. Kids need to learn tools.
Now, when we look at Lexile as a measure of text complexity, we have to think critically about that. When we reduce Lexile and text complexity down to a number, we take something very complex and attempt to simplify it. I just listened to Stephanie Harvey who’s an expert in comprehension instruction talk just last weekend at a conference, and she said what makes a text complex isn’t what’s on the page; it’s what’s not on the page. The inferences, the connections, and the background knowledge that a reader brings to the text is what truly makes it complex, not how long the sentences are.
